Assassin’s Creed, a series that has, for better or worse, changed over the many years of its pedigree. Some of these changes caused concerns to full-on controversy whenever they made the next title. AC Shadows is on the extreme side of the latter, getting wrapped in so much controversy that talking about the game would lead to much wilder discussions down the road. I’m pretty sure everybody has said what they have to say about missteps that Ubisoft may have taken here and there, and I’ll bring it up when necessary, but I’ll largely stick to talking about how the game is on its own, leaving out the muck of the social media discourse. And with that, let’s begin.

 

 

You know, when your game revolves around sneaking in the shadows, stalking through the rooftops, using an array of tools to fool armored enemies so you can assassinate them or whatever they’re protecting, a brain like mine doesn’t really gravitate to Italy or the Middle East. It automatically thinks of Japan and ninjas, and a game that From Software should really bring back. But anyway, ever since Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, people have been clamoring for the series to take a visit to Japan, and well, we’re finally here.

Coming with two protagonists, it signals to me that they’re not going to abandon the older mechanics of the series. A good call, considering how Mirage performed, despite its shortcomings in combat and a story that only picks up along the end. At the same time, it will continue the action-rpg system that it has been developing since Origins. Something I don’t entirely agree with, but the new series has its own generation of fans so it probably has merit to justify being there. In hindsight, I now agree with this choice. Being able to drastically change your approach when you feel like it is very much needed when you’re doing a lot of the same stuff again and again. Though it might have been far better to maybe make the game not as repetitive as it was.

So how did I find my playthrough of Assassin’s Creed Shadows now that I’ve managed to make it roll credits? Well, let’s talk about it.

 

 

Production (4 / 5)

 

 

Say what you want about this title but you’re not going to deny how gorgeous they managed to make it look. How they managed to make it all look great despite the PlayStation 5 being on the back foot as compared to more updated, new generation counterparts is pretty impressive. Detailed foliage that blow with the wind as you travel, makes for good atmosphere as you go from one destination to another. These destinations being towns that have some degree of variance to them depending on where they are, could use a bit more work to feel like they’re places that are actually lived in. However, when you’re sitting up on a lookout point everything blends very well together. What really highlights their environmental work is when they feature a seasonal change. The music, and the various shots of fields, mountains, and other vistas help in making you feel a bit more part of the world. Graphical glitches like weapons clipping through where they shouldn’t are very rare, which is in my opinion, an achievement for the open world format.

Work for the character models and the textures on them are notably good as well. Naoe is one of the few characters that have freely flowing hair, and it’s a nice touch that they included a version of that hair when it gets wet by rain or by diving in water. Other details like how light reacts to several types of surfaces like skin, woven straw, cloth, metal, and more really shows that Ubisoft knows how to flex their graphical know-how. It shows the degree of care and intention to make this game look as good as they possibly can. Most of these are noticeable only during close ups of cutscenes, and it’s likely that they really only turn it on during those moments, but still, I appreciate how far they went for AC Shadows.

 

 

Animations are a bit of a mixed bag, face animations feel very layered and detailed, but somehow the characters emoting with them feel very restricted. Much of the movement is minimal, as if trying to stay grounded in realism. But I feel like this doesn’t match the gravity of the lines they speak, or the emotion they’re trying to convey. As for the rest of the body, most of it are functional enough to look good during combat, though some attacks are annoyingly deceptive. However, there doesn’t seem to be much to look at after that. Naoe sneaking around looks just fine, and Yasuke realizing he shouldn’t have tried jumping off a high place is funny. But I don’t remember much more about how anyone else moved, everyone pretty much moved the same way. Sure it’s good to have easy to read, uniform movement for everyone when you’re sneaking or storming a camp. But maybe having people be a bit more expressive when they’re just having a drink in town, or negotiating for a bargain, or have our protagonists do a bit more than just nodding, these might have gone a long way. Talking heads can only get you so far, and it’s the fastest way to get me itching for the skip button.

For the audio dimension of this title, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Let’s start with the voices, the English voices have varying quality they have varying delivery. Some characters speak in such a way that it sounds like they’re speaking in plain, modern, American English. Some characters would speak English with an accent, think 1980s kung-fu movie accent. Some characters will alternate between these two speaking styles and seriously this was throwing me off. Switching to Japanese or Immersive mode is the way to go, in my opinion. Even if many characters sound very similar, the way they speak makes sense. On top of that, the way they delivered lines was far more within the acceptable territory.

 

 

The music in the other hand is generally within the realm of approval for me, this is again where Ubisoft shows that they are attempting to fuse other external inspirations into AC Shadows. The main theme making use of more traditional Japanese instruments is nice, but the cool part is how they portrayed the tension when introducing the main antagonists. It felt like a wild-west showdown at noon kind of tune. Most other themes were more about making an atmosphere that adds context to the situation of your environment, like the usual shifting of music between hiding in the bushes to throwing down with a couple of soldiers. Music that I recall standing out would be fighting a few bosses or certain moments with the story. Naoe’s theme being mixed with what I can only describe as some sort of punk j-rock works because of her origins, but it also works because she’s pretty much playing out the role of Bride in Kill Bill. Yasuke’s themes have some hip hop beats mixed into his, and it feels a little strange because it doesn’t mesh well with his personality. He doesn’t emit the energy that he’s from the streets, he’s a serious, straight-arrow, no-nonsense character. So maybe the tune can sound good by itself, but I wouldn’t really match it to Yasuke.

So all-in-all the way the game looks and how it sounds is pretty great, or at least as good as it can get at the scale it attempts to be at. More positives than negatives for me.

 

 

Mechanics (3 / 5)

 

 

Let’s get the combat out of the way, it’s not really reinventing the wheel or anything. You attack, dodge, parry, and you will get through this game knowing these functions. You can make use of skills as well and they’re quite useful, but these are more like an add-on to direct combat rather than a core part of the experience. Skills in general are uninterruptible, and can make you invincible. The only thing you need to make sure of is that you’ll make it hit, so it’s not deep, but it’s good to have it.

Stealth, on the other hand, feels like it has evolved a bit, but maybe not as much as it needed to. Naoe’s grappling hook makes it easy to get on rooftops. The ability to go completely prone adds a bit of depth on how you can go around unnoticed. There’s also the visibility indicator that seriously freaked me out initially since I thought it meant something else. It’s like I’m seeing Ubisoft take some ideas from older stealth games like Tenchu or Metal Gear Solid and I think it’s a great direction to take the stealth into.

 

One thing I wasn’t quite fond of was traversal, or rather, the refinement of traversal. Verticality wasn’t quite integrated into the moveset. This despite the series having a huge involvement in scaling walls and stalking rooftops. For example, your dodge button is the same as the ‘go down’ button. So if I’m trying to get down from a rooftop or onto a lower floor quickly, you would guess correctly that I am panickedly pressing the button, which makes our sneaky ninja dodge-roll along the edge of the platform instead of getting down from it. It’s also pretty common that the structures you’re striding on have irregular shapes for surfaces, where what your controls do changes with slight movement or a shift in camera angle, and yes, I found this pretty frustrating. Just climb up, damn it!

 

 

One thing I absolutely appreciate about AC Shadows is that you can turn instant kills back on. I’m so happy about this, I disliked it when assassinations suddenly didn’t do their job if the enemy was just some sort of elite. You bet I turned that on as soon as I saw it, what kind of game is assassin’s creed where you can’t assassinate? Sure, this function can completely trivialize boss encounters, and you know what? Good. You want to go in swinging swords and parrying spears? Feel free to play Yasuke. Combat feels so much better with him, anyway.

Okay, let’s break it down between these two. Naoe is your traditional Assassin-ass-assassin. Doing the sneaky work, using the ninja tools, and leaving the scene with nobody knowing what just happened. Now, Yasuke would be the polar opposite. He has limited and generally poorer traversal skills. Man can’t even land on a haystack without wrecking it. But wrecking things is his specialty, a man capable of making doors and sometimes, walls open for him. He is very much the bull in a china shop, as his stats are so much better than Naoe’s, and can tear through enemies even when many are teaming up against him.

Both characters have their respective skill trees that aren’t too complicated, each focusing on a weapon or a role they have. The skill points required to activate these skills are gained through levelling up, quests, and more. But now you don’t have just a base level, there’s also a knowledge level that’s a whole other level of grind. How do you grind knowledge level, you ask? Well, let’s go over some of the content.

 

 

Content (2 / 5)

 

 

Somebody coined the term ‘virtual tourism’ when describing how it was like to explore the content of AC Shadows, and I think they’re on to something. The next question would be how well they did it, and that’s what we’re going to look at.

This new title takes advantage of the environment its made, you can visit the many, many temples and shrines around the land. Many of them replicating what they look like today, or at least how they may have looked liked according to historical accounts. But not only that, you can sit at more scenic spots to meditate, and just take in the atmosphere. Yasuke can experience how it’s like to use a bow while riding a horse, as well as practice weapon katas if he can find a fitting master. All of these are the newer activities you can do, which are welcome to me, and completing these activities will grant you knowledge points.

Alongside these are activities that you might be more familiar with, climbing to eagle nests, raiding castles, searching through tombs, and taking contract jobs.

You might wonder why I’m not going into detail and it’s because of what they lack. All of them generally don’t change what you do. You pray at temples to random shrines that don’t really have a rhyme or reason to why the other shrines around the same temple don’t matter. Or look for lost pages which never really go anywhere, castles will have samurai daishos to slay, the list goes on. The exceptions to me would be the platforming challenges and the horseback activity since they still have a degree of variance to them when you compare them to each other. But other activities stay largely the same.

 

 

The problem continues through the story as well, story events are largely about watching people just stand across each other and talk, deciding what the next objective would be. Where you are very likely raiding another camp or fortress or castle, where when you finally get to the objective you will get one of the following results:

1. Sorry but your princess is in another castle
2. Can you fetch this thing for me
3. Thank you for saving me here is another hit list

 

Sure, we can argue that there’s a need to populate their vast map with quests to take on and things to discover, but can’t we chew gum and walk at the same time? It would be great if much of the side content properly integrated with the main quest, so at least you’d feel like you’re doing different things to get to your goal. That would make this whole knowledge point levelling make so much more sense. Why do I have to slay a hundred pirates/bandits/warriors to help this single person? I know it’s optional, but this isn’t dynasty warriors. If anything, what stood out was the set of masters that Yasuke was asked to duel, it’s basically a boss rush with a themed weapon at every encounter, stories of the characters are brief, and I enjoyed seeking them out.

 

 

Look, my general experience with Ubisoft Games tend to have a great honeymoon phase, where it introduces you to everything you can do within the first 8-20 hours of the game, and then it suddenly becomes a game you have to endure so you can keep up with the power creep it demands. The very same trend happened here.

Naoe’s story and flashbacks were paced well enough to keep me going, it also let me go at my own pace. Though, there is that strange tendency of hers with her feelings swinging harder than an election. One second she hates someone and suddenly she’s best friends with them the next. Yasuke is a bit of a strange case. The first character I can imagine when I look at him is Nagoroyuki from Guilty Gear Strive. Large, strong, honorable, sincere, a bunch of other positive personality traits. And nothing really wrong with that, but Yasuke is known to be from a faraway land, and he just knows their language flawlessly, and people just like him immediately. It almost feels like he’s getting things handed to him like an Isekai protagonist. Sure, he does go through a training arc–sorta, but a lot of things just seem awfully convenient, so the game can happen. He’s so well-integrated into Japanese society, a land he has never seen or heard of before, that he might as well be Japanese who just happens to be black. Naoe isn’t immune to this either, she’s a Shinobi as opposed to becoming a Kunoichi, she survives meeting the 12 baddies she promises to take down later. She just happens to have a family friend that can help her seek out her enemies. It’s a tall order to suspend your disbelief, but the game has to happen somehow.

So no, not a fan of the story, some of the content is good, but what you’re doing at hour 4, is likely going to be what you’ll be doing at hour 20, 30, 40, and suddenly AC Shadows is becoming a game you have to endure. And sadly, that’s not a good sign.

 

 

Features (3 / 5)

 

 

People might say that they didn’t really look into what Japan is really like, at least historically, but you can’t deny the amount of research they’ve put into the game. And it’s literally in the game, in form of the codex. A compilation of notes that gets filled as you explore that part of Japan. Lots of paintings or images that match a lot of text, which might not be for everyone, but I do think they looked into and researched the material before making stuff on their own. As for little inaccuracies like seasons when fruits should be out, well, I suppose they were following a bit of the rule of cool to make the place look a little better. I don’t really think it was done with bad intentions.

However it’s pretty easy to read their other intentions when you look at their in-game shop. Not only are there regular new items and value deals you can avail of, you can also buy a battle pass, which you complete by doing regular challenges that the game puts up. It seems that the tension of feeling like I always have barely enough resources to do anything is also intentional, as you can buy in-game resources like lumber, mon and more. However the worst offender to me would have to be the option to reveal all of the activities across the map, something I’d rather not have. I find the idea of a map-marker ridden UI very overwhelming, but having the option to just have it all revealed to you feels like buying a wall hack ability in an FPS game.

 

 

Though, not to end on a bad note, they added the option for you to basically transmogrify your look with any other gear you have so it doesn’t have to look like you’re wearing a clown suit. Something I didn’t realize until very far into the game, so Yasuke ended up looking like he’s cosplaying Thanos for 80% of my playthrough because I liked the skills it had.

Finally, the game doesn’t try to block you out of trying other sorts of builds, at least in respect to skill points, as it’s easy to reset them for any skill tree and you can just dedicate all of that to something else you want to try. They should keep this change as I largely appreciate it.

 

 

Conclusion

 

 

Delaying the release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows was probably the best choice they made for the game. The polish it has shines through and you can tell that they really just want this game to do well. Unfortunately it’s not the daring choices for characters and writing that really bog the game down, at least not as bad as the design choices for the gameplay and the content within the game itself.

Rather than making them rewarding activities, making them a hard requirement for upgrading your skills, or having to find experience points to keep up with level requirements, they feel like chores that you get punished for not doing. When most of the capabilities rewarded to you should be something you can do by default. Scouting, upgrading gear, finding and unlocking fast travel points, why are these hidden behind upgrades that I have to actively grind for in other content? Why can’t I gain knowledge points from doing standard quests, where you learn about tea ceremonies, calligraphy, and more?

Following the two protagonists gradually loses steam as you realize that they’re not going to change as characters, all the development they were going to go through? You finished that at around hour 10. You are now merely slowly clearing content so you can finish the game. Things just don’t change, and the same happened to me. I stopped trying to change things up, I stopped experimenting, I stopped learning. I would just alternate between Yasuke or Naoe depending on how I was feeling, but I didn’t even want to change the gear I had equipped. I didn’t want to grind for more resources than I needed to.

Have you ever gone through a convention or a theme park with an activity card to do? That’s what it feels like to play Assassin’s Creed Shadows. You go to an area and try the various activities it offers, which are basically the same as the last area, you get a prize for clearing them, which you will likely just dump by the time you move on to the next set of activities. You realize that it’s not a world that integrates its activities. It’s not a layered experience, you realize that it’s just some videogame and its offerings are rather shallow.

 

 

By now, I’ve made my position clear. But I know there are others out there that don’t need every game to be this thorough, interlinked, refined set of systems. Heck, I play gacha games, those literally have meaningless daily activities. But I knew what I was playing, and they knew what kind of games they were. I might have looked at it a little differently if AC Shadows was more honest with itself. But if you just need a game that’s giving you a decent to-do list, or maybe you just want to try to get into gaming, or just want something you can pop open and play maybe for an hour at a time, which is probably the best way to play this, well, this can be a decent pick up. But honestly, I can think of better ways to waste your time.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a little too bloated for a ninja suit, scoring a 3 / 5.

 

 

Available on PC, PS5, and XBOX X/S.